Twice, Robin Chase has stood on the TED stage and offered powerful visions for a green, and shared, transportation future. At TED2007, the Zipcar founder suggested that car sharing could be the solution to global warming, while also helping drivers without cars. She also posited an even bigger idea:
Robin Chase: The idea behind Zipcar (and what comes next)
a mesh network of cars that transport cellular data and Wifi along with people. At TEDGlobal 2012, Chase asked: what if our entire economy were collaborative? She shared lessons from her own experiment in the shared economy, a French peer-to-peer car rental company called Buzzcar.

Chase is a leading thinker on the future of transportation, on sharing and on minimizing our carbon footprint. In her two new projects — a vehicle communications company in Portugal and an online peer economy hub — her ideas have evolved and coalesced.

Robin Chase: Excuse me, may I rent your car?
Six years after giving her first TED Talk, Chase’s dream of creating a vehicular mesh network has become a reality. Veniam Works, which Chase founded in Porto, Portugal in late 2012, turns each car into a hotspot and enables drivers to share their wireless connection. Veniam operates off a box with three radio signals — cellular, wifi, and 802.11p, a signal that creates a wireless network between cars. Each car in the system has a black box that taps into the network and creates an umbrella of coverage over the entire physical area in which the mesh-enabled cars are driving. Ultimately, Veniam creates a better wireless service for everyone. Low-cost and resilient, Veniam’s strength and future lies with every new participant. Currently, Veniam has 500 of them in the Porto metropolitan area.

Chase describes this network as transforming “dumb” machines equipped for just one function — driving — into multi-purpose devices that transport data along with people. Like Zipcar and Buzzcar before it, Chase is rethinking how we can use transportation systems to make our societies stronger.

Chase has also been busy thinking more about economies of sharing. In her 2012 talk, Chase identified a need for online platforms for the collaborative economy. Now, she’s doing just that — creating a way for individuals to share their skills and needs. She’s on the board of Peers Incorporated and Peers, a pair of organizations that showcase the businesses and individuals pioneering the shared economy. Peers Incorporated supports businesses like Etsy and Buzzcar, which link local service providers with local demand. Peers serves more of a social purpose — it’s a hub to connect individuals with local services and opportunities in their area. Neighbors sign up to bring each other flowers, fix a leaky faucet, or cook each other dinner. Chase hopes it will eventually redefine community.

Chase sat down with the TED Blog to discuss how she’s putting her big ideas into action. Below, an edited transcript of that conversation.

You’re introducing transportation innovations in locations all over the globe. What criteria do you look for when considering a location to start a program, like Veniam in Portugal or Buzzcar in France?

I’m opportunistic. [Laughs]. It was a very funny connection to Veniam — I had told my friend, no kidding, six years ago, “Here’s my dream. I want to do a vehicle mesh.” And then I got an email from her two years ago, and she said, “Robin, you asked me this question three years ago, and today I have the answer. Here’s this man who is doing what you want to do.”

So I’m working with João Barros, and it turns out that Portugal just has all the right things simultaneously right now. It’s got a really great group of engineers, and because of its economic circumstances, the city government and local companies have been very willing to do stuff with us, because they want to boost Portugal. They want to have things happen there. So we’ve had a lot of interest. But it’s really kind of intriguing to think that if you go to a place that’s economically hurting, people are willing to help and to give you a whole bunch of partnerships that they would never do in San Francisco, for example. So that’s nice.

I chose France for Buzzcar because I had this idea that France is closer to the future of transportation than the U.S. France famously did the bike-sharing, and France just started Autolib’, which is the one-way car stuff. So from an economic and car use perspective, I knew France was going to be a really great place. And it was a really great place. France has often been a forefront of transportation innovation — they were early in the airplane space, early in the car space, early for hot-air balloons, early for the Metro. It’s just a kind of funny thing, and you wonder why — but they can’t tell you why.

If you think about entrepreneurship in general — at least the disruptive, cutting-edge kind that I’ve been doing — you want to change as few parts as you can. You don’t want to have to change everything out, because it’s asking users to do too much of a leap at one time. So if we think about Zipcar, I used to get asked all the time, “Why do we not use electric vehicles?,” and I felt like I was already asking people to pay by the hour, to rent these cars, and to use cars differently — and I didn’t want to add yet another difficult cog. So if you think about Buzzcar in France, you know, people are doing a lot of sharing. They already are living car-independent lives, a lot of them. So I wasn’t asking them to change too much. I was just replacing some of the cogs. In doing disruptive innovation, you want to choose the place where people are the ripest. Where you have to transform less.

Do you think that these are models that are replicable across countries, or is this something that really fits in one specific society?

I get asked a lot if sharing is cultural. And I push back a lot on that, because I think there’s a lot more to sharing. One is that in our daily lives, all of us share all the time, without even thinking about it. You’ll give someone a ride home, you’ll lend someone something, you’ll do someone a favor. It’s an incessant thing. We don’t call it sharing, but we do it all the time.

Ultimately, it boils down to economics. And the economics of sharing assets is compelling anywhere. So I think all of these things are definitely replicable around the world.

Are you still confident in the power of collaborative economies to help us address climate change?

With the pace of change because of climate, because of sustainability, because of our energy systems, I think the more community resilience we can build into things, the better. An idea that I like a lot: We need to exercise our community muscle. And we can do that in many, many ways. There’s hyper-local, community, online — these new organizational structures. This exercising of the community muscle means that we have a kind of community muscle memory and a community muscle reflex,. So when bad things happen, or when we’re looking for solutions to big problems, we turn first towards thinking that we’re going to solve it in a community way.

If we go to the bad things that I think are going to be happening shortly, that is a much better reflex than I’m going to do some stockpiling of guns and ammo in my basement. Right? We really want people to have a community reflex. And if you look at [Hurricane] Sandy, it was really striking to me in New York — and I think it was under-appreciated — how, amazingly, there was a community response. There was no looting, and there were people hanging plugs outside their windows. A community together responded, which was not what I think people would have anticipated.

And I was just thinking about the typhoon [in the Philippines] that just happened. It’s absolute calamity, and the emergency responders aren’t nearby. They aren’t there. Which is why we need things like mesh networks. But the first responders are the community, and so we have to get ourselves into a place where the community has a mechanism, and an instinct and the memory of being the first responders. They really should be the first ones that we go to.

You made several statements in your first TED Talk about what had to change in the next 10 years to improve our environment. We’re halfway through — have we made any progress?

Oh my god! We have just 20 years in order to do something that’s pathetic — which is to give ourselves a 50/50 chance of staying at two-degree global warming. We really have to get focused on the fact that this isn’t for our children, or for our grandchildren. It is happening at this unbelievable pace right now, and we have no time. We really, honestly, truly — we’ve squandered all the time.

We can’t solve exponential problems with linear solutions. And we are absolutely facing an exponential problem right now. And this is where my response is, “try the peers-incorporated paradigm,” because it is honestly the only thing I can see that can deliver the speed and scale of what is required.

I’ve been really on the beat to get people who are thinking — who have great solutions, or who have money to pour into solutions — in terms of platforms. The best answers have to be platformized. I think there’s one of two things that everyone should be doing. One is building community, and two is building platforms. And if you aren’t working on one of those things, you’re wasting your time.

But it’s also exciting to think about. We’re now opening up all of those brilliant people, and their innovations and their creativity in really productive ways. We now are offering the ability to discover and give voice to the creativity that is found in populations.

Do you have suggestions for people who are interested in participating in this collaborative economy to get involved?

They can join Peers.org, which is a new organization that connects people participating in the shared economy. They can also use the services identified on Peers Incorporated, another website I manage. I’m trying to give the diversity of sectors in which this business model is happening, and give a flavor for why it’s a compelling business model. I just am struck again and again how incredible it is to see the diversity of things that I think are [using] this business model.

Zipcar went public about two years ago, and then Avis bought it about six months ago. While you’re not in charge any more, what innovations do you hope they’ll implement?

I think that Avis did not buy it to kill it, that’s for sure. They bought it because their competitors are doing car-sharing, because, as I said, the shared car is a giant part of the future. I think Zipcar has been not doing much innovation — in fact has done very little innovation since it got founded. So I don’t see that Avis is going to do any less innovation than what Zipcar was already not doing. I don’t think they’ve been very innovative for a while.

I think there’s a lot of space for innovation, and so they could innovate if they wanted to. If I just circle back round to the peers-incorporated business model, the ones that we find that are doing it are mostly disruptive. It’s mostly not the legacy companies opening up. Although we see examples, mostly legacy companies are not moving fast enough. So I feel that way about Avis. They could. They absolutely could. There’s no reason why they couldn’t, except for that we see big companies prefer to protect the status quo and not evolve.

What kind of spaces do you think they could evolve into? What could they learn from the past 10 years?

The connected mesh-enabled car, the other forms of transportation that include individual assets. The connection between thinking about how people are moving in cities because of technology. When Zipcar was invented, smartphones didn’t exist. Are we leveraging smartphones to the extent they can to support the whole sharing economy? So all of these things revise the increasing pressure of people living in cities. I feel like Zipcar has lots of potential there, because they’re riding major trends. Are they going to take advantage of those?

Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar, is proud of her company’s emphasis on sharing. But now, a decade later, “it’s really time to push the envelope,” she says in today’s talk filmed at TEDGlobal 2012. Chase’s latest venture, Buzzcar, provides an online platform for people in France to rent cars from their friends and neighbors. “Instead of investing in a car, we invest in a community,” Chase says. “We bring the power of a corporation to individuals.”

Companies like Buzzcar are commonly described as “peer-to-peer,” but Chase prefers the phrase “Peers Incorporated,” which implies not only sharing among members of a network, but also the involvement of a corporation as a go-between. In other words, Peer Inc. companies marry a corporate side—which uses economies of scale, resources, expertise and standards to create a platform—with a peer side, whose diversity, specialization, and innovation yield services and products. “The two of these are delivering the best of both worlds,” Chase says, with each side providing what the other can’t.

Chase points out that building the platforms that connect these two entities isn’t trivial — and it’s hard! Every decision at Buzzcar requires that she consider two groups: the car owners and the drivers who are renting them. On top of that, there is a big range in quality when the product is offered up by individuals instead of a single company — which necessitates ratings and commentaries, but also leaves room for an “exceptional amount of innovation.”

“When I think about our future and all of the problems that seem incredibly large,” Chase says, “Peer Incorporated provides the speed and scale, and the innovation and the creativity, that is going to answer these problems.

To hear more about what makes these businesses different, watch Chase’s talk. And below, 10 great examples of Peer Inc. companies — some Chase mentions, and many she doesn’t.

Carpooling.com, now running in over 40 countries, allows drivers to offer passengers a ride. According to company data, Carpooling.com transports one million people every month and has saved a million tons of carbon emissions..

TaskRabbit connects those whose to-do lists are unmanageable with people who want to help complete them (for pay, of course). Tasks fall into categories from house cleaning to computer help to research to moving..

On Change.org, users can start a petition, which — unlike a petition you’d put up on your own blog — has a much greater chance of being seen and signed. “Gathering people behind a cause used to be difficult, requiring lots of time, money, and a complex infrastructure,” the website points out. “But technology has made us more connected than ever.”.

Via TopCoder, developers and designers create digital products on the self-described “world’s largest platform for digital open innovation.” Over 425,000 members participate..

Kickstarter offers a platform for crowd-sourced fundraising. Projects range from movies to radio programs to inventive new gadgets. (Kickstarter has even become successful enough to prompt a backlash, as seen in this New Republic post, or this one on Gawker.).

On Super Marmite, home cooks can sell portions of their leftovers. In Paris and looking for a serving of lasagne bolognaise at 6pm? That’ll be three Euros, please..

Kiva facilitates microlending across the globe. Those wishing to borrow money meet with a field partner, who approves their request and has it translated for Kiva’s website. On the site, you can give as little as $25 to a internet café in Mexico or help a group in Burundi buy fish to sell at market. Once entrepreneurs pay back the money, you can re-lend it to other Kiva participants..

Gusta.com provides a platform for people to “attend or create amazing culinary experiences,” like cooking classes, food tours, supper clubs, and food festivals.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/11-fascinating-peer-incorporated-businesses/feed/4RobinChase_2012G-embedjessicargross4 great talks for International Women's Dayhttp://blog.ted.com/4_great_talks_f/
http://blog.ted.com/4_great_talks_f/#commentsSun, 08 Mar 2009 12:30:00 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2009/03/4_great_talks_f/[…]]]>To celebrate March 8, International Women’s Day, we suggest these four TEDTalks gems from some amazing speakers — artists, scientists and economists who think deeply about the role of women.

Author and activist Isabel Allende discusses women, creativity, feminism — and the power of passionate thinkers and doers:

The former Finance Minister of Nigeria, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, talks about one key opportunity to grow African economies — by investing in women and the businesses they start:

Scientist Nalini Nadkarni explores the world of the forest canopy — and shares her findings with the world below, through dance, art and bold partnerships. She’s working to inspire the next generation of women scientists:

The wonderful Nellie McKay sings “Mother of Pearl” (with the immortal first line “Feminists don’t have a sense of humor”) and “If I Had You” from her sparkling set at TED2008:

]]>http://blog.ted.com/4_great_talks_f/feed/3emilytedZipcar and beyond: Robin Chase on TED.comhttp://blog.ted.com/robin_chase/
http://blog.ted.com/robin_chase/#commentsThu, 31 Jan 2008 09:07:50 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2008/01/robin_chase/[…]]]>Robin Chase rose to fame by founding Zipcar, the world’s biggest car-sharing business, but that was one of her smaller ideas. In this presentation she travels much farther, contemplating road-pricing schemes that will shake up our driving habits and a no-fee mesh network as sprawling as the United States Interstate highway system. But how could you build a free wireless system that vast and pervasive? Chase finds the answer in a few short lines from The Graduate. And it has nothing to do with plastic. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 13:39.)

So I’m going to talk about two stories today. One is how we need to use market-based pricing to affect demand, and use wireless technologies to dramatically reduce our emissions in the transportation sector. And the other is that there is an incredible opportunity, if we choose the right wireless technologies, how we can generate new engines for economic growth and dramatically reduce C02 in the other sectors.

I’m really scared. We need to reduce C02 omissions in 10 to 15 years by 80% in order to avert catastrophic effects. And I’m astounded that I’m standing here to tell you that what are catastrophic effects, a three degree centigrade climate change rise that will result in 50% species extinction.

It’s not a movie. This is real life. And I’m really worried, because when people talk about cars, which I know something about, the press, the politicians and people in this room are all thinking, Let’s use fuel-efficient cars. If we started today, 10 years from now, at the end of this window of opportunity, those fuel-efficient cars will reduce our fossil fuel needs by 4%. That’s not enough.

Now I’ll talk about more pleasant things. Here are some ways that we can make some dramatic changes. So the ZipCar is a company that I founded seven years ago, but it’s an example of something called car sharing. What ZipCar does is we park cars around dense urban areas for members to reserve by the hour or the day, instead of using their own car.

How does it feel to be a person using a ZipCar? It means that I pay only for what I need. All these hours for a car sitting idle, I’m not paying for it. It means that I can choose a car exactly for that particular trip. So here’s a woman that reserved Mini-Mia and she had her day. I could take a BMW when I’m seeing clients. I can drive my Toyota Element when I want to go on that surfing trip. You know? And the other remarkable thing is that, I think, it’s the highest status of car ownership. Not only do I have a fleet of cars available to me in seven cities around the world that I can have at my beck and call, but heaven forbid that I would ever maintain or deal with the repair or have anything to do with it. It’s like the car that you always wanted that your mom said that you couldn’t have. I get all the good stuff and none of the bad.

So what is the social result of this? The social result is that today’s Zip car has a 100,000 members driving 3,000 cars parked in 3,000 parking spaces. Instead of driving 12,000 miles a year, which is what the average city dweller does, they drive 500 miles a year. Are they happy? The company has been doubling in size every since I founded it, or greater. People enjoy the company and it’s better, you know? They like it.

So how is it that people went from the 12,000 miles a year to the 500 miles? It’s because they said it’s $8 to $10 an hour and $65 a day. If I’m going to go buy some ice cream, do I really want to spend $8 to go buy the ice cream? Or could I do without? Maybe I’ll go buy the ice cream when I go do some other errand. So people respond really quickly to it, to prices.

The last point I want to make is that the car would never be possible without technology. It required that it was completely efficient. It takes 30 seconds to rent – to reserve a car, go get it, drive it. And for me as a service provider, I would never be able to provide you a car for an hour if the transaction cost was anything. So without these wireless technologies, this as a concept could never have happened.

So here’s another example. This company is GoLoco. I’m launching it in three weeks. And I’m hoping to do for ride sharing what I did for car sharing. This will apply for people all across America. Today 70% of the trips are single-occupancy vehicles. Yet 12% of the rides to work are currently carpool. And I think that we can apply social networks and online payment systems to completely change how people feel about ride sharing and make that trip much more efficient.

And so when I think about the future, people will be thinking that sharing a ride with someone is this incredibly great social event out of their day. You know, how did you get to TED? You went with other TEDsters. How fabulous. Why would you ever want to go in your own car? How did you go food shopping? You went with your neighbor, what a great social time. You know it’s really going to transform how we feel about traveling. And it will also enhance our freedom of mobility, you know? Where can I go today and who can I do it with? Those are the types of things that you will look at and feel.

And the social benefits, the brightest single-occupancy vehicles, I told you I think 75%, I think we can get that down to 50%. The demand for parking is down. And the CO2 emissions. One last piece about this is of course to be enabled by wireless technologies. It’s the constant driving that’s making people want to be able to do this. The average American spends 19% of their income on their car. And there’s a pressure to reduce that cost, yet they have no outlet today.

So the last example of this is congestion pricing very famously done in London, when you charge a premium for people to drive on a congested road. In London, the day they turned the congestion pricing on, there was a 25% decrease in congestion overnight. And that has been persistent in the years that they’ve been doing congestion pricing. And again, do people like the outcome? Ken Livingston was re-elected.

So, again, we can see that price plays an enormous role in peoples’ willingness to reduce their driving behavior. We’ve tripled the amount of miles we drive since 1970 and doubled them since 1982. There’s a huge slack in that system. With the right pricing we can undo that.

Congestion pricing is being discussed in every major city around the world and is again wirelessly enabled. You weren’t going to put tollbooths around the city of London and open and shut those gates. And what congestion pricing is, is that it’s a technology trail and a psychological trail for something called road pricing. And road pricing is where we’re all going to have to go. Because today we pay for our maintenance, and wear and tear on our roads with gas taxes. And as we get our cars more fuel-efficient, that’s going to be reducing the amount of revenue you get off of those gas taxes, so we need to charge people by the miles that they drive. Whatever happens with congestion pricing is that those technologies will be happening with road pricing.

Why do we travel too much? Car traveling is under-priced so we over-consumed. We need to put this better market feedback. And if we have it, you’ll decide how many miles to drive, what mode of travel, where to live. And work and wireless technologies make this real-time loop possible.

So I want to move now to the second part of my story, which is, you know, when are we going to start doing this congestion pricing, road pricing is coming. When are we going to do it? Are we going to wait 10 to 15 years? Or are we going to finally have this political will to make it happen in the next two years? And I’m going to say that’s going to be the tool to turn – turn out usage overnight. And what kind of technologies – wireless technologies are we going to use? This is my big vision.

There is a tool that can help us bridge the digital divide, respond to emergencies, get traffic moving, provide new engine for economic growth and dramatically reduce CO2 emissions in every sector.

And this is a moment from The Graduate, to remember this moment, you guys are going to be the handsome youmg guy and I’m going to be the wise businessman. “I want to say one word to you, just one word. Yes sir? Are you listening? Yes I am. Ad Hoc Peer to Peer self-configuring wireless networks.”

These are also called “mesh networks.” And in a mesh, every device contributes to and expands the network, and I think you may have heard of it before. I’m going to give you some examples. You’ll be hearing a little today from Alan Kay. These laptops, when a child opens them up, they communicate with every single child in the classroom, within that school, within that village. And what’s the cost of that communication? Zero dollars a month.

Here’s another example in New Orleans. Video cameras were mesh enabled so they could monitor crime in the downtown French Quarter. When the hurricane happened the only communication system standing was the mesh network. Volunteers flew in and added a whole bunch of devices. And for the next 12 months, mesh networks were the only wireless that was happening in New Orleans.

Another example is in Portsmouth UK. They mesh-enabled 300 buses. And they can speak to these smart terminals. You can look at the terminal and be able to see precisely where your bus is on the street. And when it’s coming, and you can buy your tickets in real time. Again all mesh-enabled. Monthly communication cost, zero.

So the beauty of mesh networks: You can have these very low-cost devices. $0 ongoing communication costs. Highly scalable. You can just keep adding them, and as in Katrina you can subtract them. As long as there’s some, we can still communicate.
They’re resilient. Their redundancy is built into this fabulous decentralized design.
There isn’t anybody in Washington lobbying to make it happen or in those municipalities to build out their cities, because there’s zero ongoing communication costs. So the examples that I gave you are these islands of mesh networks, and mesh networks are interesting only as they are big.

How do we create a big network? Are you guy ready again for The Graduate? This time you will still play the handsome young thing, but I’ll be the sexy woman. These are the next lines in the movie. Where did you do it? In this car? So you know when you stick this idea, where would you expect me, Robin Chase, to be thinking is, imagine if we were to put a mesh network device in every single car in America. We could have a coast-to-coast free wireless system.

I guess I just want you to think about that. And why’s this going to happen? Because we’re going to do congestion pricing, we’re going to do road tolls, gas taxes are going to become road pricing. These things are going to happen. What is wireless technology? Are we going to use a good one? Maybe we should use a good one. When are we going to do it? Maybe we shouldn’t wait for the 10 to 15 years this going to happen. We should pull it forward.

So I’d like us to launch the wireless internet – interstate wireless mesh system. And require this network be accessible with open standards. Right now in the transportation sector, we’re creating these wireless devices. I guess you guys might have FastPass or EasyLane -– that is single-purpose devices in these closed networks. What is the point? We’re transforming just like a few little data bits when we’re doing road controlling, road pricing. We had this incredible excess capacity. So we can provide the lowest-cost means of going wireless coast to coast. We can have resilient nationwide communication systems. We have a new tool for creating efficiencies in all sectors. Imagine what happens when the cost of getting information from anywhere to anywhere is close to zero.

What you can do with that tool? We can create an economic engine. Information should be free, and access to information should be free. We should be charging people for carbon.

I think this is a more powerful tool than the Interstate Highway Act and I think this is as important and world-changing to our economy as electrification. And if I had my druthers, we would have an open-source version in addition to open standards. And this open-source version means that it could be – if we did a brilliant job of it – it could be used around the world very quickly. So going back to my – one of my earlier thoughts. Imagine if every one of these buses and telcos were part of a mesh network. When I went this morning to Larry Brilliant’s TEDTalk prize. These fabulous networks. Imagine if there were an open-source mesh communication device that can be put into these networks, to make all that happen. And we can be doing it if we could get over the fact that someone is – this little slice of things is going to be for free and we could make billions of dollars on top of it. But this one particular slice of communications needs to be open source.

So let’s take control of this nightmare, implement a gas tax immediately, transition across the nation to road tolling with this wireless mesh, require that the mesh be open to all with open standards, and of course use mesh networks.